The adventures of a homeschooling family

Howard and RachelAnnie, Emma, Sarah, Laura and Adam

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Yesterday ended being salvageable, hooray.I informed the girls that they lost their trip. I also informed them that they had lost TV for the rest of the day. Sarah thought she would die. She loves the TV. Oddly enough, their attitudes improved.No, I didn't give in and take them anywhere. In fact, I stuck more strictly to the schedule than I usually do. They finished their school work by 1:30 and spent the rest of the day learning about composers and artists on Starfall, playing in the backyard and making up a play with their American Girl Dolls. Howard called during his lunch break to tell me that the line at the American Girl store was all the way around the building, like the line to meet the Princesses at Disneyland. And that was just to get in to the store. That was a silver lining to be sure. I hate standing in line to spend my money. Also on a positive note, Howard bought a new camera on his lunch break. He and I are still figuring it out. We have banned the kids from touching it. They think its a cool camera, probably because its red, and it actually works. Nothing fancy, just a basic Nikon point and shoot.School wise: Annie misread the schedule and started her analogies one day early. I had wanted to talk to her about how to do them. One of them threw both of us for a loop. Leaves is to goes as... both of us read it as leaves on a tree, not leaves a room. Oops. She is doing better on her math and is understanding graphing points. She likes how neat her work is when she uses graph paper too. I still can't figure out the Oregon Trail link that Steven sent me, so she is being deprived of having little Jimmy get cholera or breaking a leg. She is faithfully doing the work on By the Great Horn Spoon, even though she raced through the book in two days.Emma learned a little about Hannibal yesterday. Mainly that he used elephants to beat the Romans, then later when Scipio took Carthage, Hannibal drank poison and died. Positive history lesson. She then made an elephant out of air drying clay. She is flying through her language arts with no difficulties. As for math, I am looking into a different program for next year. Saxon is good in that it doesn't have distracting colors, but for some reason she is not remembering the math facts. Every day she asks about 11-2. She thinks it should be 2. Not good, especially since she is scheduled to start multiplication this week. Review, review, review. I know she will get it, its just a matter of being patient.Sarah is starting to learn her letters. She knows the ones in her name and can write S,H, and A. I have just discovered that she has no idea what the other letters are. Not by sight, not by sound. I made her a file folder game that has letters and animals. She matches the animal to the letter it starts with. For now, I have written the animals name on the back of each card so she can identify the beginning letter. It will take some practice but she will get it. I will make a new game then that involves upper and lower case letters. I am also looking into basic lapbooks for her.Laura likes to get into the other file folder games and mix up the cards. She also likes to build with legos and push her shopping cart filled with toys, and pretend to talk to daddy on the phone. The day ended well. The kids remembered to set the table, try their food at dinner,clean up after themselves and later read to themselves in their rooms. The younger kids also got a kick out of feeding the dog all the scraps from dinner. I guess that counted as clearing off the table. For our next FHE we will be going over how to look up scriptures by reference instead of page number. We'll also start learning the songs with the order of the books.Patience is the order of the day today. If we can all keep that in mind, today will be better than yesterday. It is only 5 am and I am the only one up, but I can dream.